The Wraeththu Chronicles (26 page)

One evening, the red-haired Har came alone to my room. He brought with him a tray of food, which I obediently began to eat. I was surprised when he spoke. "Pellaz, do you feel stronger now?" I must have looked startled, jolted out of my mindlessness. I had not thought about myself or my condition since waking up here. He did not press for an answer.

"I am Vaysh," he said.

"Vaysh," I repeated, stupidly.

I think it genuinely hurts him to smile, he so rarely does, but he did try for me that night.

"You must bathe," he told me. Silent-footed hara drifted into my sight and, at his signal, raised me from the bed. Dizziness blinded me again. All I could see was flashing light as they eased my arms into soft cloth. "Slowly!" Vaysh instructed. Slung between them, they carried me off.

When my vision cleared, they were lowering me into a bath set into the floor, steaming with greenish aromas. I know this ritual, I thought. It was all so familiar; only the room was different. Flickering recall of Mur and Garis . . . Saltrock . . . inception . . . Cal. . . . Then the knife twisted in my heart. The veil in my head turned to glass, thin as ice, and shattered. I made noises, horrible, unintelligible noises and all the time, the ghostly, silent hara just kept on smiling their soothing smiles, caressing my skin, their lingers lathering my hair. Weeping, in a hopeless, monotonous way, I lay in the bath, salt in my mouth, behind my eyes, saying his name endlessly in the tortured dark of my mind.

They put me back into the bed, oh so gently, their soft sighs filming my pain. So beautiful they were, so beautiful, but surreal and heartless. They laid me naked on the bed, on my back and drew back the light, gossamer linen. The room was warm and I did not shiver. Vaysh was standing at the foot of the bed, clothed in violet, holding a purple, glass vial. He gave it to one of my attendants. "Make it easier for him," he said and turned away. I could hear his footsteps, soft as a cat's, fading down the hallway outside my room. I was turned onto my stomach, arranged neatly, and salve from the vial was applied to my body. It felt cold as ice. I was rolled over and the procedure was repeated; I could hardly keep from laughing.

Laughter through tears; I kept switching from grief to hysteria. "Who is it?" I asked, but they would only shake their silken heads, like slender flowers. With a glass rod, one of them filled me with unguent that spread sleepily its insentient cold through my loins. Perhaps they could not speak. Perhaps he had taken that from them. They straightened my legs and flicked invisible creases from the sheet. I was not afraid. Nervous of the waiting, yes, but not afraid. They stood, one each side of me, by my head, their faces turned to the door. I had expected them to leave.

Then there were footsteps outside, faraway, coming down the hall, brisk but unhurried. Nearer they came and it seemed to take forever. I knew. I knew and my heart was bursting. He was coming. Thiede was coming. Yet I was still surprised when it was him. He came into the room and stood there, where Vaysh had been before, arms folded and the disguised light of enthusiasm in his eyes. I spoke his name.

"Yes," he said. "Do you remember Saltrock, Pellaz?" I nodded at him.

"I remember."

"Was it so long ago I wonder? Can you remember the things I told you?"

"No, not now."

"And the things I didn't tell you?"

"I remember all of them."

"Am I a god to you?"

"No, not that. I don't know what you are."

"Are you ready for me?"

"I can't ever be ... can I?"

"You realize what must be?"

"I think so . . ."

He wanted to say more, he was enjoying it, but then thought better of it. I could see him, his shining robe shifting with subtle colors, his flame eyes. His lips parted to release a Sound. He began to... sing? No. A Sound; like a different language of gentle vibrations. His arms dropped to his sides, his head went up. I could see his eyes... shining. Reflecting light; they were white stars. All the light in the room went dim but for him. My heart! A pounding that sent the blood cataracting to my loins; my heart sucked dry. The Sound filled up the room, rising, becoming louder, more strident. I knew that sound. Knew it, knew it. His face; changing. His neck, cording, twisting, hair writhing, crawling, lifting

"No!" I whispered, in disbelief, in denial, yet I still felt my body call to him. His teeth, his lambent eyes . . . taller. His hair was crackling with orange flames. It could have been Lianvis standing there; the elemental Lianvis of beneath the earth. He was naked, his body coursing with colors; colors I had never seen before, that hurt my eyes. He was above me, hovering, crouching. I tried to move, but his hara held me down. I could see their teeth; they smiled. I screamed in agony, but then in ecstasy; his smoldering, smoky breath bringing me to the lip of the abyss that was lit at its deepest point by a star of pulsing red. Movement there; bats, ravens, demons, all the creatures of the lake of fire rose up to claw my hair; their talons in my flesh that shuddered to a nameless delight. I wanted the pain, craved it; reduced to an animal fury. He filled me with the hot, smoking essence of his incomprehensible soul. It ripped me, scoured me, ate into me like acid. It was melting me apart, the sizzling rain of hell and I screamed, and I screamed again.

Is it a nightmare, is it? When I came back to my senses, I was alone, and at first I thought, "What have I been thinking?" But then I saw that the room was full of smoke, and the smoke was full of the smell of seared flesh. Then I began to moan. It was the right thing to do. I called upon God, "Help me! Help me ..." I was sure I was dying again and it was a slow, lingering death. I did not want to die. Not again, I pleaded, please, not again. I could sense myself ruined. Sense myself used up, burnt out, finished. You have to die! You have to! Vaysh materialized beside me, out of the vapors. His hand hovered over my shoulder.

"Don't try to move," he said.

I could have laughed. Move? Could this charred remnant move? Vaysh was pushing tubes down my throat. "Open the window!" he called, over his shoulder. Cold air sucked the heat from the room and blew away the smoke. Vaysh was touching me with one hand, sitting on the bed. I tried to raise my head. One glimpse was enough. The bed, the pristine whiteness of my bed, was polluted with the dark stains of dried blood. It looked like dried blood. My body was purple and black and blistered.

"Don't move," Vaysh repeated. My eyes felt cracked and shriveled; it was a miracle I could still see. It hurt to close them, yet I longed to do so.

"I don't ever want to have to do this again," Vaysh said to someone I could not see. Disgust filled his voice. I began to slip and Vaysh said, "I'm losing him!" Another voice answered him, calm and confidant. "It proceeds as it should." As it should.

Thiede. I contemplated on his magnificence in the higher spheres. He had brought me back to him from death; this personality. Now he had mutilated me; he held me dangling on the end of a silver thread. Why? But I knew he would not let go.

For days I must have hovered on the threshhold of a second death. Vaysh was in constant attendance. He was there to heal me and he succeeded. Thiede knew that. Vaysh is one of his best. My mind was nearly broken and I retreated deep inside myself, seeking once again the comfortable idiocy of my first days in this place. Yet I could not shut out my senses completely. They drugged my body, but not my mind. Even though I feared insanity, I was aware of everything that happened around me, no matter how hard I tried to escape inside myself. My poor brain, exhausted, stunned, but still laboring on. I made an impossible vow never to speak again, and banished all memory of Cal from my thoughts. It was the only way I could cope.

When they took away the tubes and tried to make me eat, I vomited with uncontrollable force. The tubes were put back.

One day, Vaysh put his hand on my paralyzed legs. "Tomorrow, we shall leave here," he said. I whimpered and wept, and he did not comfort me.

The symbolism of the thirteenth key

Winter; white, crackling, numbing. Vaysh rode a black horse, I was strapped onto a gray. Behind us, Thiede's marmoreal palace reared like a vast, sparkling bird of prey. Before us, dark canyons wreathed in drifts of snow. The sky above was pale. I had no idea where in the world I was. It was the first time I had ever seen snow, the first time I had ever been this cold. I was anaesthetized almost senseless, unaware of where we were heading and for what purpose. Wrapped in thick furs, strapped with leather, lolling with slack face upon the back of my silvery horse.

I had been given no explanation for anything that had happened to me or for what was to come. That Thiede had a definite plan was obvious, but I was only his pawn and as such, it was unimportant that I should know what was going on. I was changed for ever; into what I did not yet understand. There had been no mirrors, no words to tell me. Vaysh hardly looked at me. He had my horse on a leading rein. I could see his long, red hair, powdered with white, blowing back on either side of his fur hood, his

straight back; a prince of Wraeththu. All sound was muffled in the pure and crystal landscape. No tracks other than our own marred its virgin shrouds. I sat and dreamed and sat and dreamed, as the sun arched from one horizon to the other. Once darkness fell (but it was never completely dark), we came to a wooden cabin under a sheltering overhang of rock. Icicles fringed its porch; drifts of white fingers reached toward the windows. Vaysh unstrapped me and hauled me to the ground. He had a key to the cabin and dragged me inside, leaving me alone as he went back into the snow to see to the horses. Some of the drugs were beginning to wear off and I began to whimper. I felt so different; distorted, heavy. Crippled and tied into the furs.

Vaysh methodically built a fire in the dusty grate and unpacked food to cook. He had paused only to feed me with milk from a beaker that was nearly frozen. Now I could smell rice simmering in a froth of garlic and my mouth filled with reluctant saliva. Once he was content the food was cooking slowly, Vaysh turned his attention back to me. I was lying on the hard, wooden floor, trussed like a chicken. Vaysh moved his mouth a little. It may have been a smile. "Let's unwrap you then," he said. It was the first time he had spoken to me that day. It took him some time to undo all the straps and pain was waking up in me with greater and greater strength. I was groaning and trying to twist around. When I was naked, I could see my body had become gray and misshapen like half-worked clay. The sight of it silenced my noises. There was a low, wooden bed, barely softened by a thin mattress. Vaysh lifted me as if I weighed nothing and laid me out on it. They had packed cloth around my loins and I had helplessly soiled it. Vaysh heated water on the fire and silently cleaned me. Incontinent cripple. His eyes held no expression other than concentration for his task. He did not have to offer me an explanation. I was reduced to the state of nothingness; something like before I was har. But he did speak. Vaysh the cold; Vaysh the silent. My loyal assistant, always; scarred frigid by distant pain. He lifted his head and looked at me with his hard, gray eyes. I saw him properly for the first time. His face almost makes you jump when you see it. A wistful, childlike beauty, until the flint in his eyes makes you look away. He looked so young, yet I had thought him older.

"It will not be long," he said. A boyish, soft voice, but so cold. "Three days? Maybe. Maybe four, it's different for everyone."

I was still adhering to my vow and swallowed the questions filling my mouth. Vaysh stood up and went back to the fire, staring into the pot of rice.

"You must eat some of this. Don't try to be sick, don't try to be awkward; I don't want any of that."

I moved my head as far as it would turn to look around me. The room was rustic and coarsely furnished, but a haven from the snow. Heavy dark curtains, grimed and colorless with age, hung against the windows and the back of the door. It was becoming quite warm.

Vaysh lifted my head and spooned small portions of rice into my mouth

At first, I refused to chew, like an obstreperous child. Vaysh put his head on one side. "Damn!" he said, without rancor. "Come on, eat it. Hurry up; 1 have to eat as well." He prodded my lips with the spoon. "Come on!" Churlishly, I opened my mouth. It did not make me feel sick, but I could manage only half the bowl. Vaysh covered me with a hairy blanket and sat by the fire to eat his own portion. He consumed it as neatly as a cat only without the relish. After that, he spiked my neck and pumped a soporific into my veins through a tube, his face serious with concentration. As I drifted away, I wondered what he was thinking . . .

I do not really know how long we journeyed for, but from what Vaysh had said, I think it must have been for about four days. Thiede's horses were tireless; we rarely paused to rest them. At nearly the same time every day, sundown, a wooden lodge would appear through the dusk. Thiede's people must often take this path, I thought. I had hoped that my condition would improve, but each day I felt sicker and sicker. By the fourth day, I did not even have the strength to swallow and Vaysh gave up feeding me. He seemed strangely unconcerned. I kept mumbling inside myself: I am in hell, I am in hell... I suppose I should have been grateful he spared me any pain (Thiede had supplied him generously with drugs), but I was far from comfortable. Every few hours, Vaysh would dash our water leathers against a rock or a tree to smash the ice, and then dab at my congealing mouth with water and wipe my eyes.